American artist and filmmaker Kerry Tribe's large-scale projects in video, film and sound formed an on-going investigation into memory, subjectivity and doubt.
For this exhibition, Tribe showed her new body of work Dead Star Light alongside other existing works.
Dead Star Light was comprised of three works which continued Tribe’s study of memory and it’s opposite, forgetting. Each work structurally engaged with a different technology in innovative ways: 16mm film (Parnassius Mnemosyne); reel-to-reel audio (Milton Torres Sees a Ghost); and video (The Last Soviet), all 2010. The works relate to questions of personal and historic memory and share common themes of erasure, flight, portraiture and the role of the viewer.
Dead Star Light was shown together with H.M. (2009), a work which also explored memory but from an individual, neurological perspective. This film installation, an experimental documentary about an anonymous amnesiac known within the scientific community simply as Patient H.M., set up a structure whereby the viewer’s own power of memory was challenged.
